The Flying School with a Difference

“The regulations are framed for areas of high population, not for the sparsely populated areas of this country where neighbours are miles away, where people are cut off from or just don’t have the facilities that people in cities and larger towns take for granted.

“They are the forgotten people of aviation. ‘

Some of those “forgotten people’ who have been students of Gowing now fly themselves to the next-door neighbour’s home for lunch, fly to town for shopping and meetings, fly from town to check on properties hundreds of kilometres away or muster their cattle with their own aircraft.

According to Gowing, people in remote areas need to fly as much as they need to know how to drive. Even women-especially women – need the communication with neighbours that flying can bring. But the days of flying the flying school into western towns are over, says Gowing. The requirements now set by the Department of Aviation make it either uneconomical, impractical or both to set up a temporary flying school.

A school with two instructors must have a building with at least three rooms, there must be other facilities, including toilets.

David Gowing said a flying flying school needed more than just facilities. It needed a commitment from instructors prepared to spend three months in 40-degree heat – not a week every month, or a spasmodic timetable in which the instructors might not turn up for weeks at a time. It needed a commitment from the students, a minimum of six prepared to fly every week during the period. It was economical only if the flying school could move in, get the job done and move out.

Gowing’s first experience teaching at a remote location was at Windorah on Coopers Creek when he was instructing for an Armidale-based school.

From that initial contact, he was approached, in 1978, by potential pilots at Quilpie after he had left Armidale and gone into debt to set up his permanent school at Kempsey.

A sympathetic bank manager, who was also a pilot, lent Gowing five years’ salary and enough to buy his first training aircraft, a Piper Tomahawk (Foxtrot Tango India) which is still giving sterling service.

To repay the bank, Gowing had to go looking for business. Kempsey was producing little at this time; the approach from Quilpie was easy to accept, but not so easy to bring to fruition in the middle of a fuel crisis and a shortage of avgas.

Gowing could not get a drop; he could not break into the fuel companies’ ration system. The Quilpie students, aware of the crisis, tried to call off the venture, but Gowing needed the business. He begged for a fortnight’s grace, during which time he pressured oil company agents, politicians, and anyone who might be able to help. Just days before the deadline, $5000 worth of avgas suddenly became available.

Gowing engaged a junior instructor and flew the Tomahawk and a Cessna 172 the 600 nautical miles to Quilpie – all on the basis of a promise from a group of 12 would-be pilots who had each paid $500 deposit as a show of good faith. Later attempts to organise schools at Goondiwindi and Tenterfield did not come off. Gowing, who was bred on the land, believes he did not have the support of the ‘townies’ that he enjoyed with the cattlemen in south-west Queensland.

In remote areas, where department officials are rarely seen, Gowing found people already flying aircraft – unlicensed. One property owner had been ‘taught’ by his daughter, a pilot of limited experience who sat in the righthand seat while her father found his way around the controls.

The pilots in south-west Queensland live, work and fly in a harsh environment that bears no favour to fools. In summer the temperature hovers around the 40s day and night. During Gowing’s three months there, a tourist died in the bush when his car radiator was holed. In town, a man hung himself, unable to bear the heat.

Property owners cart water – for the wife’sgarden – for the fear if they lose the garden, they might lose the wife, too.

There are no lights to guide the night VMC pilot. Over the featureless land on a pitch-black night, the class 4 instrument rating is not a standard to be relied on.

Dust devils can alter an approach by 40 degrees with a similar effect on airspeed.

Dust can ruin air-driven instruments, cuts out oleo seals and invade every crevice in the aircraft. Every outback landing strip seems to have its own built-in crosswind.

Communication are paramount. Gowing said that a loss of HF radio could be overcome with a switch to the VHF frequencies of the overseas carriers. Gowing said his students got out of trouble by calling up British Airways, Pan Am, Qantas, and on one occasion even American military traffic, who were not amused at first but later swung into the system and were friendly and helpful.

Gowing described the outback pilots as keen and most safety conscious, but also highly critical of bureaucracy and red tape.

Not only the students learn from the experience. Gowing says he is now better prepared to train Western pilots and teach them not only to survive but also to make the best use of their aircraft, including low-level mustering.

David Gowing’s flying flying school operated at Quilpie for 10 weeks, averaging 55 flying hours a week. The students carried the commitment to keep the aircraft in the air. If one student was unable to take his turn, another would double up.

Gowing and his instructors were billeted at various homes, passed around from one to another during the period.

They managed one two-day break – when one of the students decided his aircraft was due for a 100-hourly and that it should be done in Kempsey, 600 miles distant.

Gowing, who has logged 11,000 hours in the air, 7000 as an instructor, said it was unlikely he would take his flying school to south-west Queensland or another remote are again. Now firmly established at Kempsey with an array of aircraft -including two Tomahawks, a Cessna 172 and a twin Aztec -online, the flying school now looks to students coming to it. But Gowing believes the remote are a pilots are still a forgotten race in aviation. He said their needs were different to the needs of the majority who fly amid the higher traffic densities of the coastal and metropolitan areas.